


biting the hand of fate

by orphan_account



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Post-Time Skip, Pre-Time Skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:29:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24045169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Four times Death knocks at Sylvain's door, and the one time he answers it.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 12
Kudos: 58





	biting the hand of fate

“ _Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine._  
  
_I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time._ ”

\- Richard Siken

The first time I met Sylvain, he’s eleven, he’s in a well, and even through the dark his steadfast colours shine a bright green.

There is something you need to know: Humans, in all their corporealness and mortality, possess auras. His is emerald, drips like Nabatean blood and pools into the cracks. He reeks of envy, and of regret, and of unrequited love and every other emotion under the overcast sun that bards warble of.

If I encompassed organs of any kind, instruments such as a beating heart or the twist of a gut, I might have felt something. But instead I sit, and I wait, because the boy looks as if he has walked to Ailell and back. It wouldn’t be until later, when a slighter boy would find him, would have a dreadful suspicion that maybe the Gautier territory was not as kind as his child’s mind initially imagined, that I would notice his fingernails. Bent and broken, bloody and raw.

I will let you in on a secret: Souls do not always easily depart. They do not always slip into my hands, to be cradled as if a new babe abandoned by its mother. Even when their vessel shows up days later with unexplained bruises, a healing cracked rib, and a bloodshot eye that looks as if it has been smashed with a blunt object. Nor when it’s abandoned on the side of the frigid Gautier mountains, dividing their northernmost border from Sreng’s. Not even when it’s sitting next to the boy from before, with his clashing colours of saturated red, and the two of them have no words to form except for the whispered promises that neither will die without the other.

I do not know when your time will come, or anyone else’s, for that matter. It is not something I have control over. You’ll see me soon enough, in gradual passing, when it’s time. Do not fret over perhaps missing me. I don’t slip over anyone. I did not slip over them, either, but I will tell you this: The day I finally collected Sylvain Jose Gautier’s soul, it was linked hand in hand with the boy’s.

The second time I met Sylvain, it was not because I was there for him. I was there for the man who lay some distance off. A little older, a little gruffer, a little more battle-scarred. But his hair was the same colour of Sylvain’s. Bright, like flickering flames, like smoldering coals, like the burning hatred inside the boy’s heart I had once nearly claimed inside the well.

He’s on his knees this time, like before, but it’s not because he’s struggling to keep consciousness. Instead he’s cradling a lance, streaked with his brethren’s blood. It paints his porcelain skin with a kaleidoscope of cranberry hues, blocks out the freckles dusting his cheeks like a cloudy winter’s night. Behind, as always, is the boy with hair made of cormorant feathers.

It was the first time I studied the existence of the other’s aura. It’s maroon, like the rich blood now filling every crack and crevice of Sylvain’s skin.

This is what I see: Wrath.

I will admit now that I do no remember every soul that comes into my clutches. I do not care to. My task has become mundane at this point. I am sure the satchel at my side contains a few thousand souls at this very instant.

Part of me does remember Glenn Fraldarius, though. Only because of the way I had watched his final moments, watched the way he tucked the crumpled piece of paper into his breast pocket for another soldier to later find. It was addressed to a boy no older than twelve whose name was Felix.

Afterwards, the remaining who lived had shipped off the sword that rested by his eviscerated body. It reached the steps of the Fraldarius manor a week later.

The note wasn’t ever found.

So now that the same Felix whose name still lays in the fading penmanship of a dead brother stands before me, I realize what he is made of. Sharp steel, cold eyes and an even colder heart. He’s a whirlwind of festering vexations, and his tongue is as lethal with its venomous quips as is the tactful mind he guards so carefully. His body is angular, jutting at odd slopes and filled with so many nooks and crannies that one could have compared him to an immeasurable valley. All things that are kind and all forces that are good could not have pieced together the broken glass inside of him.

I noticed and would later come to realize it as a deeper, more meaningful feeling that had driven a rift between their once close friendship. The kind that the songstresses sing in the grand opera house of Enbarr. I was there, once. For an actor who had misplaced his footing, fallen, and cracked his skull into pieces amongst the cobblestone flooring beneath the stage. The blood had been thick and viscous, illuminated like oil upon water by the low-lit candles.

And maybe, if Sylvain had ever let himself stray his eyes where he deemed they did not belong, he would have seen the way the raven boy looked at him. Would have noticed his bared fangs and feral glares were deeper than the feigned annoyance on the surface. And maybe then it would not have surprised him so when a hesitant hand was placed to his shoulder in that moment. Scarred palms and calloused fingers, old lacerations that were whiter than the milk-rich skin they already populated. I do not fully know Sylvain, but I do know this: There would be nights for moons to come where those hands would haunt his dreams.

When I take Miklan’s soul, it’s light and unguarded, and feels like the weight of a starved child. I did not know this man, had only heard his name once, when it came from the garbled sounds of the boy in the well and the same boy who had been crowned with an axe handle to the eye socket. Whatever animosities had plagued his mind to do the atrocities it had so brutally crafted were gone. The reek of fear and bitterness still clings to his corporeal vessel, but in my satchel, there is only lingering words he had not yet said. I picture that his living colours were grey. Bleak, and suiting for the indiscernible sins those mangled joints had produced.

I do not linger on it.

When I begin to depart, Sylvain has stiffened from the touch of Fraldarius, and the swordsman mistakenly takes it as an insult.

He’s pulling away as if he’s been scorched by Sylvain, when I turn and vanish.

The third time I met Sylvain, he’s somewhere between finally reaching for my hand and standing his ground in the bed that is eerily all too similar to the casket found in a noble’s grave.

He’s being eaten alive. His skin is alight, sweat dampens his hair, curls it into ringlets that the man beside him would find endearing if not for the dangerous undertones it now suggests. Because in truth, Gautier’s only heir is slipping further into a comatose-like trance. He’s laying with his shirt blown open, and there’s the stench of infection hanging coarse in the air.

Because despite all that the world has thrown at him, Sylvain still is resilient, and the arrow wound to the right side of his torso would be nothing more than another pearlescent scar to his plenty dozens if it were not for the bacteria now staunching even the most gifted of healers’ magic.

It was at that peculiar moment when I had first heard the beginnings of a roughened song. There’s a hum in the air – a particular _dum dum da_ that echoes the sounds drums so often play in marching parades. I see him, then. He’s a little wiser, a little taller, a little more filled. But he’s still the same boy I recall being a cracked vase. Except his hair isn’t made of feathers anymore. It’s something akin to twigs and mud.

If Sylvain were not on the edges of joining the collection I had so righteously grown, maybe the man wouldn’t have let the tune rumble haltingly from his chapped lips. But the paladin can’t hear, and it’s clear he has been bed-ridden for days by the stubble now lining his jaw. So instead Fraldarius picks up the beginnings of a melody he once heard sang from the streets by a girl I would later come to know as Annette Fantine Dominic. Her soul would not come to greet me until decades later, arm in arm with her husband who had died a year previous. His name was Ashe Duran.

Maybe it is because I had taken Rodrigue Fraldarius’s life mere weeks ago that the events to unfold next happened. I can’t say for certain. But I do recall how his soul felt, restless and at unease. It hadn’t wanted to leave so soon.

I did not rest long enough to see what his son’s reaction to receiving the news was.

It is funny, sometimes, how cruel my profession can be.

It’s an overcast day when it becomes apparent Sylvain will not be joining me. I have become used to his stalwart drive to remain with a beating heart. That is not what takes me by surprise, but the raised voices and a broken crotchet note do.

They don’t start until sometime later. But when it happens, it’s a flurry of flying papers and curses and something along the lines of _I thought you were going to die_ and _Idiot_ and _I love you._

I recall telling you about that immeasurable emotion that stirred and disrupted their friendship all those years ago. About scarred hands haunting a certain auburn man’s dreams and the guilt of knowing those same fingers were what had caused his own to stray down, down, and further downwards until they had touched roughened thighs and the source of his misery.

It is amusing how the swing of time’s pendulum changes things.

I do not dwell to encroach on acts of intimacy. But I do recall the way half a decade’s worth of longing drives the human body, and all its intricate workings of sinew muscles and tendons and bones. The last thing I hear is Sylvain’s tongue rolling from the palate of his mouth, positively sweet and as fresh as dripping honeysuckle as he utters this single line: _Felix._

It is decades later when Sylvain Jose Gautier finally meets me. I would not have recalled him, if it weren’t for the way his hair still shone and stood on edge like dancing flames. He’s still got the scar under his left eyelid from the axe, and even though his nails are grown and roughly fined I still catch glimpses of invisible tides of carmine blood that cannot be so easily scrubbed away.

There are streaks of silver lining the edges of his hair, and he’s grown a thick stubble, if only for his husband’s own personal enjoyment. Two daughters, I noted at the time, and Sylvain treats them even when they are no longer piping children as if they are wholly sacred. Neither bare crests.

When I find him, it is not in the midst of a war, nor is it on the outskirts of a battlefield. It is not in the towering snow-capped Gautier mountains, and it is not underneath layers of the Earth’s own bounty. It is instead with entangled limbs, a bare foot touching an even barer thigh. And there, in his arms, is the man made of glass that has been so delicately, intricately placed together that I almost believe it to be another being entirely.

There would be news that the Margrave Gautier and the Duke Fraldarius had died in their sleep during the Harpstring Moon of that Imperial year. But I’m there before the servants and maids and spectators are, and I am the one who first declares their passing. Much as I always am.

When I finally reach for their hands, they are compliable. There’s a smile, an uttered _Hello_ and a sense of warmth encompasses me.

It is time. We turn towards the light.

**Author's Note:**

> Was really excited to write this, even though I struggled at some parts. Thank you to Kasey and Pepper for continuously cheering me on throughout this whole process! I hope you guys enjoy, and as always, I appreciate all feedback.  
> Title comes from the song Hallucinate by Oliver Riot.


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